Episode 327: You Ain't So Smart (Flannery O'Connor's "Good Country People")

0:00Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist Dave Pizarro, having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics. Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say, and knowing my dad, some very inappropriate jokes. The only thing an old man can tell a young man is that it goes fast, real fast. And if you're not careful, it's too late. Of course, the young man will never understand this truth.

0:57They think deep thoughts, and with no more brains than you have. Pay no attention to that man.

1:09Anybody can have a brain.

1:13You're a very bad man. I'm a very good man. Just a very bad wizard. Welcome to Very Bad Wizards. I'm Tamler Summers. Dave, the listener response to last episode's tier ranking of academic fields was fierce. Did you know chemists were that sensitive? I did not. I didn't think they had emotions, to be honest. I know. Right. Otherwise, they wouldn't have gone into chemistry. No, I know. Like, should we just say like this, it was going to be an interrupt?

1:45Like, it really does seem like people took us a little more seriously than we intended. Like, this was not like our definitive value judgments. If we do a slight peek behind the curtain, that discussion took an hour. And then the subsequent discussion, which will appear on this episode, took a very long time as well on Flannery O'Connor's Good Country People, which everyone will hear. And I think it was a good discussion. Yeah. But a long one.

2:16And so we usually have like to sleep. You know, we have to sleep. It's true. But yes, we heard almost exclusively from chemists and the stray economists. And I heard from my philosophy of feminism teaching wife, as I predicted, that ranking gender studies so low was a personal insult to her. And then I said, no, no, no, no, but you're a philosopher of feminism. And she was like, oh, okay, okay, maybe I'll. We made that distinction.

2:46You know? Yeah. Also, by. It's not like she listened. It's not like she listened. Also, by Texas state law, I literally couldn't give it anything above a C. And even like giving it a C puts me at risk. Yeah. Yeah. Puts my job at risk, my family at risk. Of all the shit we've said. Yeah. It was surprising because I really think even though it carried over into a main episode, like I felt like we were pretty upfront about our ignorance.

3:17Like. Multiple times. Yeah. Multiple times. Nobody wants to hear. Nobody wants to hear that we rank their entire life. I see. But we also made it just about majors, too. Like we were real measured. It's weird. Because it would never have occurred to me, like if I was a fan of a podcast and they put philosophy low, like to get really upset by that. So maybe it's your issues, listeners, and not our issues. Go think about Avogadro's number or whatever it is you do.

3:49Chemists.

3:526.022 times 10 to the 23rd. Put the little piece of paper in to see if it's acidic or basic. Oh, no. We're just drawing. I love chemistry. I love you guys. We love chemistry. Yes. As many listeners pointed out, chemistry is where you get the drugs. And we appreciate the drugs. And we appreciate the medicine. Although, you know, some of it. So, yeah, we're going to talk about a really great story. And I hope our discussion did it justice.

4:24Flannery O'Connor's Good Country People. I fucking love that story. I thought it was. It kind of blew me away. And in a specific way where, like, I thought it was great while I was reading it. And then the ending just also, like, gobsmacked me. So, yeah. But first, we're going to lay off the chemistry, people. And talk shit about the sexomniacs. Sexomniacs? Sexomnia. This is a paper that you, no, I found.

4:55Well, it was our good friend, Neuroskeptic on Blue Sky. Yes. And God bless that man, whoever he is. Or a woman. I think he's added as a man. I think so, too. Yeah. He, him. Left-hand sleep masturbation in a right-handed male patient with sexsomnia. Yeah. So, this is, yeah. How would you describe it? Hot off the presses.

5:26And hot. May 2026. It's from the future. From Sleep Medicine. And this is about just an individual case study of a male patient who suffers from a parasomnia, a sleep disorder called sexsomnia, where he jerks off while he's asleep. So, this is from the abstract. Here we present the case of a man who was accused of sexually assaulting his girlfriend during the night, but had no memory of doing so.

5:56During a video, polysomnography, he masturbated in his sleep with his left hand during the N2 and N3 sleep stages, confirming sexsomnia. Sexsomnia. However, he always masturbated with his right hand when awake. This is a twist. This feels like a Law & Order SVU. Like, how do you know he always masturbates with his right hand when awake, you know? Yeah, it's, uh, what's the fuck the name of that, goddammit, where he goes, One More Thing. Oh, Columbo?

6:27Columbo. It's like a One More Thing. Yeah. Are you sure? What hand do you, do you always masturbate with the same hand? Why is the lotion on the left side of your bed? Columbo's great, by the way. Like, that's one of the most fun things you can do is just plop yourself down and watch a Columbo. I only ever watched, like, a few episodes. It was, like, slightly before, like, my maturity levels. I mean, it was before my time, too, but you could find the reruns of it.

6:57Like on USA or whatever. Peter Falk. God bless that man. I love him. But, yeah, like, so, there's a lot that's a little suspicious about the story, but should we go through the case report? Yeah. So, all right. So, they describe this man in all of, like, the technical ways, like his weight and his sleepiness. And they say that, look, nothing seemed wrong. He didn't have to pee during the night, which is, you know, like a problem for some men.

7:29And he had some snoring. But for the last six years, his partners would report nocturnal sexual behaviors. And, yeah, the not funny part is that one of them was his girlfriend who reported to the police that she had been sexually assaulted. He sleep talked, but he didn't sleep walk. He didn't have sleep terrors. And so, the thing that he has is basically, like, not during dream sleep, so not during rapid eye movement sleep when we dream.

8:00Before that, we go through three stages of sleep before getting to REM. So, stage one, two, and three. During stages two and three, he would have what's called these arousal incidents where you basically just wake up. You just wake up in the middle of these sleep stages and just, like, start mumbling and incoherently. And then you'll, like, go back to sleep. But if you wake up, you're super confused. You have no memory of it. It's the same thing that happens in sleepwalking, except for in sleepwalking, you're walking.

8:30In this case, you're just staying in bed. But, like, some people, like, I've heard of this before, do these sexual behaviors when they have these wake ups. You know, nobody donates to charity or anything when they have these.

8:44Nobody's, like, helping old ladies across the street. Like, they're not, like, engaging in any other, like, nice behaviors. You know? It's just, like, raping. They're not, like, going on to, like, 1-800-Flowers. Exactly. It says something about you. Men know scum. Yeah. But so this, like, this is the other part that was, like, kind of fascinating to me. So if we're to believe this. Yeah. That he's masturbating with his left hand.

9:16Yeah. When he's actually right-handed is apparently consistent with some other research out there. And so it says, recently, Avedan et al. pointed to a surprising laterality shift in masturbation during sleep. Right-handed men and women using their left hand. So there's something going on in your brain that they think might be, like, related to the fact that this is involuntary. That is causing this shift from, like. But, but. Yeah. Okay. I have an issue with this.

9:47I feel like right-handed people masturbate with their left hands. Like, that's, like, almost a cliche. Like, it's not that unusual. Right. To masturbate with your off hand. And all we have is his word, I assume. Because, I mean, I'm not saying he's lying about this. But I'm saying it's weird that they make such a big deal about that. Yeah. All they say is the patient confirmed that he only uses his right hand to masturbate while awake. Yeah. So, you know, maybe he's, like, you know, like, just faking it completely to get out of the wrap.

10:21Well, no. Even if he's not, like, I just think, like, that's a normal thing. I don't want to get into any personal confessions, but I don't know. Like, I thought. I'm a, yeah. I'm a righty and a righty in both cases. So, I, like, I go. This is, like, I think they said the only case, or at least just not very many cases, where they actually have video of him in the lab doing this while they're recording his brainwaves. And so, they have, and, like, the little standard, like, the following are the supplementary data related to this article.

10:55And then they just have a video of him, like, asleep. And he's not even really masturbating. He's just kind of putting his hand in his pants, which we all do. It's just like the Al Bundy move, it looks like. But, you know, like, he might be jostling it a little bit. Like, I can't, it's kind of dark. Can't tell. But he's not, like, jacking it. No, no. You know, he's not. He didn't have to. It's all underneath the clothing. He's only, like, getting to second base with himself, basically. Yeah. Which I feel like, like, I'll do, like, during seminar, you know.

11:27I hope not. No, but you know what I mean? Like, not during seminar, but if I'm watching a movie and, like, I have, like, a cover or whatever, you know, I'm going to put it in there and just, like, just for warmth and comfort. Look, you know, like, I have, like, an infant child, man child, and it's a behavior that starts very early, let's just say.

11:50So, yeah, like, they tried to treat this with gabapentin. They put them on Paxil. The Paxil apparently helped, and they report that the girlfriend dropped the charge, which seems like a little, like, maybe not the scientific part of this case study. Also, they talk about self-masturbation in a way that's very confusing to me. Like, I would think that if you say masturbation, it's understood that you mean self. Right. Like, this is actually a conceptual analysis question, but, like, can there be, like, other masturbation?

12:27I feel like we could talk about this for a lot because when people talk about mutual masturbation, I think they mean fondling each other. They don't mean I'm sitting there jerking off and she's sitting there jerking off. Right? Okay. I'm not sure, actually, because I think, like, well, mutual masturbation is often used metaphorically, and then it does mean we're kind of jerking each other off. But I feel like if I was going to hear that in a porn or sexual context, it would be, well, it would be two women masturbating side by side.

13:09Like, side by side? Yes. Yeah, yeah. See, like, I feel like there's conceptual slippage here. I feel like sometimes people mean next to each other, you know, like in the Gooner article when, like, the guys are all in the same room watching a porn and jerking. I wouldn't say that's mutual masturbation. I would just say that's a bunch, that's just masturbation, like, simultaneous masturbation. But you remember in the article, like, if you could have, like, a card, that means someone can just, like, reach around and, like, you know.

13:40Right, but then if they're reaching around, they're giving me a handjob. They're not mutually, we're not mutually masturbating. Yeah. Right. But then, so then I think mutual masturbation, so, oh, you're saying it's impossible. It's, like, incoherent. Exactly. Yeah. Or, yeah, I think people mean it in the incoherent way, because I feel like if they were talking about side by side, they would say it. If we were philosophers, we would turn this into skepticism about masturbation. Like, it would just mean there's no such thing as masturbation, because we can't come up with, like, a counterexample free theory of, like, yeah.

14:16That's right. That's right. But, all right, so, you don't buy the, like, what this says about free will. Well, no, here's what I'm not sure I buy is the story. Like, so, like, what's your credence? What's your priors? What's, you know, you run it through your Bayesian formula. Like, that this guy isn't, like, he got handsy with his girlfriend and then just kind of invented all this. I assumed that. Like, I just assumed that.

14:47Yeah. I assumed this is a fake journal where you can pay to have, like, exonerating journal articles, scientific journal articles written about you. So, you don't know about sleep medicine, this journal? I don't know about it. I'm sure it's fine. And I have heard of parasomnias. Like, I mean, of sexsomnias. Like, that's true. This all just seems like, like, the left-handed thing just seemed too convenient to me. I mean, I believe if these are real scientists, like, they did observe him and they did record the wave function, like, while he's sleeping.

15:20And, you know, that's how we determine what stage of sleep you're in, like, which waves. And he does appear to be touching himself during these, you know, stage two and three of sleep. But I just feel like you could take a video of me while I'm sleeping and I might do what this guy's doing in the video. I think the idea is that you're, like, during these stages of sleep, you shouldn't be moving with, like, any kind of, like, volition or whatever.

15:53Unless you have sexsomnia. Unless you have sexsomnia. But I actually don't know how many of us just wake up kind of in the middle of these sleep stages. And because you don't, like, get up and murmur things or, like, to your knowledge. Yeah. I feel like I would be surprised if, like, one morning my wife was like, you were in the middle of sleep. You were, like, vigorously going at it. But then it's the video that makes it seem less. If they hadn't shown the video, I would think this guy is just full-on, like, trousers down, you know.

16:29Yeah. They shouldn't have showed the video. They should. I think. It was underwhelming. But I, you know, like, maybe it's a real problem. And maybe, I don't know if GiveWell is going to make it one of its major charities.

16:45They should. They should.

16:49I like that they tried a lot of different drugs, too. Yeah. And he found that. Well, like, he had sleep apnea, too. So, you can, you don't want to give. It's like, apparently the gabapentin made the sleep apnea worse, so.

17:04Yeah, that sucks for the girlfriend, though, so.

17:08Absolute worst combination. Like, is this a real thing, I guess? Like, what's your credence? Like, that everything is straight here? Like, gun to your head. Gun to my head, I would say yes. Only because, like, these people's reputation are resting on what they're showing us of him, like, being asleep and actually doing this is real. What's less, what I don't know is because, like, even if this is real, what we don't know is whether the assault is an instance of this. Because, you know, because you can imagine he really has this.

17:41Right. And yet. Oh, the fucker. Yeah. Like, he's just like, oh, I can just, is that what you think, if you had to guess? No, I'm inclined to believe it all, but really only because I've heard of people attempting, like, and being, doing sexual assault while they were actually sleeping. But then, then again, it's not like I have a lot of evidence for that stuff. It's just the, what, what, what sleep researchers have said. And they are French. Like, you know, they have a typically more tolerance for sexually problematic behavior.

18:17I, I, I don't know. You're going to have to cut so much out of this. I don't know. There's something about this that strikes me as weird. I guess it's a real journal, though. Like, given that they're from the Sorbonne, if that's real. Like, I wasn't sure if this was, like, a James Lindsay thing. Like, or. I mean, it is, it is dated May 2026. So make of that. I, I, I, I'm saying gun to my head. There's something fucked about this. I don't know what.

18:47Well, literally. Um, sexsomnia behaviors, by the way, I wanted to say this before. Include, this is the first, uh, the second sentence. Include self-oriented behaviors such as masturbation, spontaneous orgasm, sexual vocalization, genital touching, and coital-like pelvic movements. Like, in my day, they called that wet dreams.

19:08But if you're, if you're thrusting your pelvis while you do it. Yeah. Well, nobody's like, yeah, nobody saw us when we were doing it. We were 12 years old. Those were the days. But I like when they hear we present a case of a right-handed man who masturbated in his sleep using his left hand as if that's just, like, unheard of. That's the thing that raises the red flag for me. I mean, this is why I was interested in this especially, because it raises questions of identity, you know?

19:40And, uh, volition. This is, who is this man? Is he right-handed or is he left-handed? Is this, what does this say of his character when non-volitionally he's jerking off with his left hand? And what does it say about the self? Why is that, like, any less of himself? Like, I've been reading about dialogical views of self. Right. Yeah, so. What if he embraced with his second-order desires the masturbation with his left hand? Well, uh, we will...

20:10Um, we will come back to this, I think. This is part one of a long series of sexomnia segments. All right, any last, any last things to say about this? No, other than maybe we've just given everybody an out for very bad behavior. Don't do, I don't think this is gonna work. Like... Especially not now. But, you know, I'm glad to know that men find every occasion to masturbate that they possibly have.

20:40Possibly can. Buses, ballparks, and the middle of sleep. All right, we'll be right back to talk about Good Country People by Flannery O'Connor. Will's gonna be fine. Be great. Have it. Je Madam containing that waking has helped her live with the writer. You'll be right back. Good times, we'll be right back at home, distraction space. Look this everybody has come to see that we took the devil. The pagarregistration pod, please. We'll be right back with it. I will be right back at 600,000-20108. We'll be right back, Scott.

21:10Thedropre. Be great. Juh... Did you give a great idea of getting this movie from that? You'll be right back at play. I mean, guys, we'll be right back at play on Demand. We'll be right back at play sometime and then,ye sights it, like, this cruise. And soon, let's be right back at the camera. Thank you.

21:48Thank you.

22:18Make a name for herself, Eliza Summers. Eliza, welcome. Thank you. We'll get to your business at the end here. Let me go through some business here. If you would like to reach out to us, send us an email, however you like to get in touch, you can reach us at verybadwizards at gmail.com. You can tweet at peas, at Tamler, at verybadwizards. You can follow us on Instagram, like us on Facebook, join the subreddit where we just did an actually fairly pleasant and nice AUA over the weekend.

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23:22A week from now, we'll be releasing our next Lotus Eaters, the book-by-book deep dive into Homer's Odyssey. We just recorded on books 11 and 12. This is where Odysseus goes to the land of the dead. There's the sirens. There's Scylla. A lot of things going on there. We also just opened up our VBW March Madness tournament for the listener-selected episode. Right now, all of our Patreon subscribers are suggesting topics, and then we'll narrow it

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24:29Wizards family. Eliza, you are writing and directing a thesis project, a kind of capstone of your film career at the University of Texas, Austin. Not the University of Austin. You are a UT Austin film student. This is kind of the capstone of your career. What is this short film about? Well, it's a father-daughter story. It's about Janie. She's our main character. She's moving home, and her dad, Mason, is helping her move.

25:02He's not thrilled about her move. He thinks, correctly, that it's because she's a little too scared to start this next chapter of her life. So all of that to say, they're in the back of a moving truck. When all of a sudden, the truck slams shut, they're in darkness, and it starts moving forward. We meet these two small-time crooks who think that they just robbed these people and stole a truck, but actually, it's now a kidnapping, and Janie and Mason have to find a way to escape. So I don't understand. It's a father-daughter story, which I love, but you say it's inspired by, you say this

25:33on your fundraising page, which we'll get to in a second, but the way you see our relationship, you think I fundamentally find you to be a disappointment because you're too scared? Yes, I do. And one of the great things about this whole production process is it's really helped me work through that trauma. Okay, great. Well, one other thing that could help you, you have budget trauma right now. It's an expensive movie, kind of an action comedy. So if there are any super generous listeners who want to support a young filmmaker doing

26:05her thesis project, any amount would be helpful, and any amount would be so appreciated. We will put a link in the show notes for anyone who might want to do that. Any final words, Lai? I don't think so, but thank you guys so much, and as always, thanks for listening to my dad. Join us next time on Very Bad Wizards. No, it's not time for that. And now let's get to Flannery O'Connor's Good Country People. All right, let's get to our main segment. We are going to be talking about Good Country People by Flannery O'Connor.

26:38And I should say, because I want to give attribution where it's due, the reason I offered this story, we decided we wanted to do a short story, so I suggested a few, and this is the one by Flannery O'Connor that I chose, not because I had read it, because I hadn't. It was because Eliza said in a class she took that that was her favorite story in the whole collection. Oh, awesome. Trusted her, and you wanted to do it. I don't think you had read it by then either, right?

27:08Yeah, no. Like, I hopped on Wikipedia and read the first paragraph description, and I was like, yeah, let's do it. Just a fantastic story. I agree with my daughter on this one. It's funny because, like, I read it for the first time this morning and was totally enjoying it. You know, it's kind of a satire at first of Flannery O'Connor country, like rural south. I guess it's Georgia, which didn't even come across to me, but from the summary I'm looking at right now, it says it's in Georgia.

27:40And there is a woman named Mrs. Hopewell living with her daughter. Joy was her name she had at birth, but she legally changed it to Holga for reasons we'll talk about. And they also have on this farm tenants, the Freemans. And their role is kind of interesting. I'm not sure what to make of that. A lot of it is kind of a comedy of manners between, you know, a description of the dynamic between Mrs. Hopewell, Mrs. Freeman,

28:13and Joy slash Holga. Joy slash Holga is a philosophy PhD. So she was an S tier. I was going to say, I'm also a major, I'm sure. Yeah. But she's also like, she represents the kind of atheist, rationalist, someone who believes that if we look with clear eyes, unblinkered by our biases and what we want to be true, we see that there is a deep nothingness at the foundation of human life and the universe.

28:49And meanwhile, her mother is just this country woman who doesn't know what to make of her daughter. Her daughter is 30. 32. 32. She has a artificial leg because she got shot in a hunting accident when she was 10. We don't really learn the details of that. And so she will read Heidegger. She will quote mall brunch at the dinner table. You know, it's just kind of at first about that dynamic. Then we hear about this traveling salesman who is a 19-year-old kid named Manly Pointer, who is a Bible salesman,

29:26and he comes to their house. And at first they're trying to get rid of him, but in the end he stays for dinner and surprisingly arranges a date with Joy or Holga the next day. So they go out on a date and then it takes a turn that honestly, I don't know if this is true of you, I did not see coming at all. And I was kind of a little bit floored by it. Not like I had to put the book down or anything, but I was like, oh, oh, okay. But before we talk about that, I do want to say read the story because

29:59part of the power of the story to me the first time was just really not expecting it to go where it goes. Like there's not some M. Night Shyamalan twist, but it's just, it just went somewhere that I didn't expect. And that really makes the story extremely powerful. That's how I felt. What did you think? About the ending, I'm totally with you. Did not see it coming and was like something that just made me keep thinking about it. I love this story. Thank you, Eliza. I think the structure is great because it's, like you said, it sort of starts off as this, like about Southern country

30:35manners and a woman who has a bit of superiority and views herself as super charitable. And because it starts off about Mrs. Freeman, the hired woman and Mrs. Hopewell, the woman who hired her, and it turns into a story about Holga slash joy, for some reason that has made me keep thinking about it. Cause like you alluded to this, but like, what is Mrs. Freeman? She's like the most enigmatic one of the whole story. Should we talk generally speaking before we go through it in more

31:06detail about what your kind of general thematic thoughts are? Yeah. Like I'm also just dying to talk about what these themes are. So I think one way of reading this, that kind of the one that kind of jumps off the page the first time, at least for me, is a critique of this kind of academic, the kind of smug superiority that Holga has, but also that kind of cosplaying nihilism that, you know, will every once in a while erupt from her at the dinner table or she'll leave Heidegger

31:40lying around without the sense that she fully understands exactly what it is that she's reading. And she, in this date comes face to face with like a real nihilist, you know? And like, she realizes that she has been just cosplaying. She hasn't really understood what it is that she proclaims to believe and what she says to everybody. And it's kind of just an unmasking of her self-deception and also just about the view itself. It's just a denuding of the pretensions

32:18of people like that. So that's one way of reading it, which I think is okay as far as it goes, but I think it goes a lot deeper than that. What do you think? Yeah, no, I'm with you. Yeah. It really is like separating the atheist comp smugness that she has from the nihilism. Like those are two different aspects of her that rear themselves like in a kind of an ugly way. She's just like a mean, like a superior about everything. And like, I'm not convinced that she really is a nihilist. She doesn't, like I don't

32:53convince that she understands what it means to be a nihilist, but her mother, Mrs. Hopewell, is smug and superior in a very different way, not an intellectualized way. That's right. And also kind of oversimplifies the world, cuts the world up into different categories, trash or good country people. Yep. And she can tell which category you belong to. There's two categories for everything. Yeah. And without really having any idea like what those things are. And, you know, it is a house of cliches. Like they, they talk a lot about cliches. And so it's not in any way kind of

33:27glorifying the goodness of, you know, actual rural Southern folk. It's funny, like Flannery O'Connor is kind of equally scathing to the sort of Northeast educated, elitist, nihilist, existentialist philosopher type, and to the people who just live on a farm and the tenants on the farm. It's like, and yet I think there is a kind of positive purpose to what she's doing here as well. Well, yeah. So I'll wait to hear your second interpretation, because I do also agree with

33:59you that it goes deeper. And I think that it is a story that has optimism at its core, but you have to dig, at least I have to dig through to find it. Yeah. On the story. And I came across something that said that a lot of people compare her as the story does almost explicitly to Hephaestus or Vulcan, the Roman version of Hephaestus, the crippled God who we just came up, we just talked, we just talked about in our Odyssey series that we're doing on Patreon. And this person argues that actually this isn't a retelling of any Hephaestus

34:33story. It's a retelling of the Cyclops story. And at first I think, wait, what? But there's a lot in there. So just to put that in your mind, that this is a retelling of Odysseus going to the Cyclops. And just to give a tiny bit of plausibility before, think of what the Cyclops is. Someone who says, oh, I don't believe in the gods. I do what I want. All that stuff is bullshit. And then somebody comes and somebody takes advantage of their disability.

35:04Maybe even a complicated man. Maybe a complicated man. So I thought that was kind of interesting. That's really cool. Yeah. Like it took me a second to line things up. But yeah, like very interesting. Of course, not told at all from the perspective of the complicated man. No. And in fact, yeah, the complicated man, Odysseus, in that telling would be kind of a villainous character, if not the most villainous character. So yeah. Yeah. Disabled with one eye, you know. He even says at the end that one of the things that he's stolen is a glass eye.

35:36That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Because the Vulcan shout out is in like Holga herself. Yeah. All right. So you want to dive into it? Do you have any other kind of general thoughts? Yeah. Well, only one other note, which is I never really explicitly pay that much attention to perspective. But in this one, I was like, huh. So it's obviously third person and it's clearly not omniscient. It's third person limited and it switches back and forth from

36:06a Mrs. Hopewell perspective and a Holga perspective in a way that I found was just a really effective way of giving us insight into each of those, the internal life of each of those. And you don't know sometimes. You don't notice it until later. It's done imperceptibly at times and it can be a little confusing. But certainly the first half or two thirds of the story is from Mrs. Hopewell's perspective. It also shifts between time kind of interestingly. Like you forget at first that Mrs. Hopewell is thinking about what happened the previous day and you start to think,

36:40oh, this is happening now. And then all of a sudden snaps back to the present as Joy is getting ready for the date. And even the way they call her Joy sometimes and Holga sometimes is, I think, a part of that. I didn't track that, but I definitely thought about it. Yeah, neither did I. But I was wondering what the motivation might be for in each case. So it definitely requires, I think, at least two readings to make sense of those time shifts, at least for me. You know what? One of the things that I was thinking about when I was reading this

37:13is it's also so Christian. Like there is explicit Christianity, obviously. And then there's just themes that it seems Flannery O'Connor has gone back to over and over again, like grace and salvation and what that means. And it's never what you would think of as grace or salvation. But as I was reading, how much of the Christian stuff for you, having not been written, like it's so, I'm reading it and I'm like, oh yeah, okay, Jesus said that. Oh yeah. I probably caught like a fraction of it. So definitely

37:45point them out to me. It seems very Catholic to me. And maybe that's influenced by, I know that she was a Catholic. It's funny because yeah, she was Catholic and she wrote about Protestants. Like she's writing about like Protestants. So she's kind of infusing Catholic ideas, but it is interesting writing about Catholics. Is it a Catholic critique of Protestant Christians? It's a good question. I didn't read it as that. Like I felt it to be her exploring themes of salvation and grace and just

38:17by using these characters. Yeah. Just broadly Christian. Yeah. Okay. Let's dive into it. I'm actually excited to get into the details. So I immediately sat up on reading the first sentence because I thought it was such a great opening sentence. Like, so this is, this is it besides the neutral expression that she wore when she was alone. Mrs. Freeman had two others forward and reverse that she used for all her human dealings. But I love that first line because it just gets you right into the action. Just like, there's no prelude. There's no, it's just, we're talking about

38:54Mrs. Freeman. And then the funny thing is she's yeah, like an enigmatic figure and, and, and things are never from her perspective. Never. And you get the feeling that there's going to be a story about Mrs. Freeman and it's not really. So it, so it switches. The whole first paragraph is about her. Yeah. I loved it. Whatever she's trying to say about Mrs. Freeman. Like I, I get it. I get the, like, I know what she's talking about. I don't know how to say it, but. You can picture her right away. You can picture right away. And she's like almost an NPC, but actually maybe the, the key to

39:25the whole story, like the most insightful one of all. What do you make of the reverse? So she has the one forward look advancing. And then she says she seldom used the other expression because it was often not necessary for her to retract a statement. But when she did, her face came to a complete stop. There was an almost imperceptible movement of her black eyes during which they seemed to be receding. Yeah. And then the observer would see that Mrs. Freeman, though she might stand there as real as several grain sacks thrown on top of each other was no longer there in spirit. Well, I mean, so like, I know what that's describing. There is a kind of person

39:57that you can talk to them and when they're comfortable with their categories, you can have a conversation with them. But if you raise something that questions, you know, something a little closer to the center of the web of belief of, you can see them turn off. You can see the eyes just kind of glaze a little bit and they're carrying on the conversation, but we're no longer actually talking. It's like she's powering down. Yeah. Or she, yeah. It's like that spirit left her. It's such a good way. Like I would have never have thought of describing it that way. Yeah. Now you get the sense, yeah, that it's Mrs. Hopewell. So that we're actually getting kind

40:32of Mrs. Freeman from Mrs. Hopewell's perspective. Yeah. So Mrs. Hopewell, we learn, has the 32-year-old daughter named Joy. And we learn that she hired Mrs. Freeman to work on her farm. That she's divorced also, which I don't know if it means anything. Like we never learned why or what the divorce was, but Mrs. Hopewell, like in, in the South, in whatever this was, the forties or something, that would be weird. Yeah. Like head of household, divorced woman. Yeah. Running a farm, taking in tenants, but yeah, it's not treated as

41:04weird at all. So maybe it wasn't weird. I don't know. Like maybe this was common. And then we learned that Mrs. Freeman had a couple of like hot daughters. Yeah. Especially the 15-year-old who's already in the family way. Glynise and Caramay. Oh, I want to ask you broadly, like her use of names is funny. Yeah. Like Hopewell, Freeman, Manly. Manly Pointer. So the 18-year-old has many admirers. The 15-year-old is already married

41:38and pregnant and throwing up constantly. Yeah. And there's this, this, you know, added little bit of character when you learn that every morning Mrs. Freeman told Mrs. Hopewell how many times she had vomited since the last report. This is why Mrs. Freeman is fascinating to me. She's like on the face of it, a small-minded person. She's just focused on these like minutia of her life. Like we learned that she's very nosy and you know, she loves gossiping, getting into things. And yet she has some sort of third eye maybe.

42:09One description of her that I love is when Mrs. Hopewell said to Mrs. Freeman that life was like that, Mrs. Freeman would say, I always said so myself. Nothing had been arrived at by anyone that had not first been arrived at by her. Dude, yeah. It's a great line. And like you were saying, yeah, like you were saying the cliched, the hackneyed phrases that they use. They have like entire, they string together like three of them into like an utterly meaningless sentence. Everyone is different. Yes, most people is. It takes all kinds to make the world. I always

42:42said it did myself. She said that afterwards. It's just, this is what it is at first, you know, before you even know anything about Joy beyond her thing, you learn about the daughters. It's kind of interesting that the daughter is already pregnant at 15 and yes, she's married, but you get the sense that that was not necessarily the plan. And maybe it didn't happen before the pregnancy. And we learn almost nothing about Mr. Freeman, who is the farmer. Yeah. And who never appears really. The only male character that appears is Manly Pointer.

43:15Yeah. Manly Pointer. It's almost a dick joke. I know. Yeah. And maybe it is. Uh, Mrs. Hopewell would tell people that Glynise and Karame were two of the finest girls she knew. Mrs. Hopewell is, if she's decides somebody is good country people, then they're good country people. Yeah. Like you get the feeling that, that Mrs. Hopewell has a bit of salvation syndrome in her. Like she's picked them and like, it's almost her project. So like with her, with her optimism and with her ability to deal with people, she's going to make something good

43:46out of this. And she categorizes them as good and she's going to stick to her gun. So it says the reason for her keeping them so long was that they were not trash. They were good country people. And clearly you see just from that, that she, that's how she divides the world up. And, and the one reference she got of them wasn't particularly good, especially about Mrs. Freeman, that she's always into everything. So. Right. And then it's just like this, this sort of superiority, like hidden by like superficial kindness where the reference says basically like, look, the guy's great. That woman, we

44:22can't stand her. Like we can't have another minute with her. She's like always getting into everything. And so she's like, okay, she's going to make it her personal project to be the kind of person who can actually turn this weakness into a strength. And here's how she's going to do it. She's going to make her in charge of it. If she wants to get into everything, like, let me make her in charge of everything. And so she really thinks that she's the puppet master able to control. Like there's a sense of superiority that she has over the Freemans that she's not just being charitable and nice. She's being superior.

44:52Yeah. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree with joy. I think that's right. It's also a nice comic touch that she hired them because they were no other applicants. Exactly. Yeah. Totally. It's so good. She's like, well, yeah, on the one hand, they were, you know, good country. On the other hand, nobody else. Right. And she needs someone to work the land and like, you know, live there. So I do think she's a little like Spinoza's rock who is thrown off a cliff and then thinks it's decided to fall. You know, like she kind of said, oh, I'm keeping them because they're good country

45:24people, not trash. But it's like, no, you're actually, you're hiring them because there's nobody else. So yeah. And yeah. And then they, you see how they kind of speak in cliches and then you get introduced to joy. To joy. Here's what I want to say about like what we learn about joy. So like you said, she, her leg got shot off in a hunting accident when she was 10. She says it was hard for Mrs. Hopewell to realize that her child was 32 now. And that for more than 20 years, she had had only one leg. She thought of her still as a child because it tore her heart to think instead of the poorest out girl in her thirties who had never danced

45:56a step or had any normal good times. Yeah. And then we learn on top of this, that she has some sort of heart condition. That's that the doctor said she'll be lucky to live until she's 45. And it made me think of a case that like, there was a woman that I knew when I was a kid who was like, went to my school who had, I think multiple sclerosis, like one of these degenerative kinds of nerve diseases that, that meant that she was going to die. Like everybody told us, oh, this girl is going to die by the time she's 18. And her parents like spoiled her. Like they

46:28let her get away with everything. They bought her everything. And like, I think she might've died in her middle age, but like it was way later than anybody thought. But like it ended up that they did not do the kinds of things that you, like the tough love that you need to give a child to develop their character. She had a really bad character. And so when I was reading about this, I was like, yeah, that's the same vibe. Like she feels so bad about what happened when she was 10 and that she's going to die that she never really raised her in the way that you would.

46:58She probably does spoil her. Certainly puts up with her in the same way with the Freemans. It's like, I am going to take this charity case and in this case, my daughter, and I'm going to make their life fulfilling. Right. But she's so proud of her patience with people. Yeah. Yeah. So it's like her, she's like, yeah, that's one thing I'm awesome at. I'm really patient. Yeah. And then she's also quite deluded about it because she really thought she kind of pulled it off until Joy went and changed her name legally from Joy to Helga. Which is such a hilarious way to rebel. Yeah.

47:34Because it's an ugly name. Yes. Yeah. That was the point. That's so emo. Exactly. She considered the name her personal affair. She had arrived at it first purely on the basis of its ugly sound and then the full genius of its fitness had struck her. She had a vision of the name working like the ugly sweating Vulcan. That's Hephaestus who stayed in the furnace and to whom presumably the goddess who's Aphrodite had to come when called. She saw it as the name of her highest creative act.

48:07One of her major triumphs was that her mother had not been able to turn her dust into joy, but the greater one was that she had been able to turn it herself into Holga. So she's saying that she's Hephaestus or Vulcan? So Hephaestus or Vulcan, the Roman name, is a crippled god who is also like a master craftsman and I, yeah, like a, what do you call the iron, iron works or whatever? And he famously in the Iliad creates Achilles' shield, which gets his

48:42own book in the Iliad. So he's also a creative person. So she's saying basically like with this name, she's turned her like crippled self into like a creative, powerful, like god. Or she's created like one of his creations, you know? That's what I wasn't sure. Yeah. Like what is the metaphor? I don't know. And how do you like, one of her major triumphs was that her mother had not been able to turn her dust into joy. Like, I don't totally understand what's being said there. It's interesting because it's joy, you know, capitalized referring to her name, but she's

49:15saying like she couldn't turn the dust, which is, you know, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, what we're made of. Like in joy, in Holga's view, we are nothing but. Yeah, dust. Yeah. And her mom's optimism hadn't been able to like make a beautiful thing out of what truly is, only dust. So she's, she's proud that she had resisted her mother's attempts at trying to make her into something more because she doesn't believe there's anything more. And then taking on the name, Holga, once again, like names have power, like the

49:45self-determination. She's identified herself as something ugly and the world is ugly and life is ugly for her. Right. So she's created a kind of a work of art that expresses the ugliness and bleakness and void. She crafted her name. Yeah. She's a blacksmith who crafted the name in, in the depths of the furnace with her crippled body. She made this name and this name is maybe like the shield is like her amulet. This is her identity and her protection. Yeah. And then there's an interesting touch where Holga is very like proud of having done

50:19that, proud of having changed the name. But then, and I don't know what to make of this, Mrs. Freeman started to call her Holga, we learn. And that was, she didn't like that. Yeah. It's weird. And only when Mrs. Hopewell isn't around because she wouldn't put up with it. Yeah. Which is all the extra kind of eerie you might think. Yeah. But it's interesting that that's something that actually gets to her. Like she's figured out how to build enough of an armor around herself to deal with her mother and all her silliness. But there's something about Mrs. Freeman that just kind of picks at something,

50:53like picks at a scab that she thought had already healed, you know, pierces the shield. Sometimes I read this and I think, yeah, women really are more perceptive about some things because this is like a, a, a very subtle thing that bothers Holga about Mrs. Freeman. She says she had learned to tolerate Mrs. Freeman because she essentially saved her from having to be with her mother and taking walks with her. At first she thought she could not stand Mrs. Freeman for she had found it was not possible to be rude to her. So this is frustrating to her that like she's

51:24not reacting to the digs that she gives her. Right. That's like a source of frustration for her. And blatant ugliness to her face. These never touched her. So she is immune. Mrs. Freeman has this power that's immune for what Holga is used to the little sphere of her control of being able to be rude to people. She, she can't have. Yeah. But Mrs. Freeman would take on, and this is like such a good turn of phrase, strange resentments. And for days together, she would be sullen, but the source of her displeasure was always obscure. So she's like, I know that this woman can get

51:57upset. Yeah. I just don't know what is making her upset because it's not the thing that seems to work on everybody else in my life. We didn't say, by the way, Holga is described as a very sort of homely person. She's large, you know, described as large or like you take it overweight and very plain and purposefully dresses herself in like bad clothes. She wore the same shitty outfit all the time. Yes. But also you get the sense that could, she could be pretty at least from the way, Ms. Hopewell. I mean, Mrs. Hopewell is hoping. I mean, I guess I pictured her as someone

52:30who is deliberately making herself ugly, but I pictured her as reading it as someone who, you know, you could do the thing that you do in movies where someone comes in and makes her up. Take off the glasses. Yeah, exactly. Let the hair down. Exactly. Which happens later as she does have her glasses taken down. The other weird thing about Mrs. Freeman, just before we move away from that. And now we're getting it imperceptibly from Holga's perspective here. And that's why I think it's using the name Holga, I think is to signal that,

53:01but I didn't get it. But it says something about her seemed to fascinate Mrs. Freeman. And then one day Holga realized it was the artificial leg. Mrs. Freeman had a special fondness for the details of secret infections, hidden deformities, assaults upon children. I love the next sentence too. Of diseases, she preferred the lingering or incurable.

53:24Yeah, actually. And then right, right before that, when she's still, when she's talking about Ms. Freeman creeping her out, she says, however, Mrs. Freeman's relish for using the name only irritated her. It was as if Mrs. Freeman's beady steel pointed eyes had penetrated far enough behind her face to reach some secret fact. Yeah. This is what I was saying where she's pierced the shield. Yeah. And there is something about Mrs. Freeman focusing on her leg that's making Holga vulnerable in the same way that I think Manly is going to pick up on the same thing.

53:54And in the way that she thought wasn't possible. And I think that's a kind of her own delusion. She thinks she has steeled herself with her just honest way of reckoning with the nothingness of the universe from these kinds of things. And it's such a kind of plain and ordinary thing to be a little vulnerable about the fact that you have an artificial leg. So yeah, see why that would really dig at her, you know? Totally. And I think, you know, of all the good things that is in this story, there is something that, you know, I don't know anybody with that kind of disability, but there

54:28is a way in which like O'Connor's treatment of this seems right and respectful, even though she's a flawed character. She's not pussyfooting around the fact that like, this is like a deep part of her that bothers her. Totally. Yeah. Here's the other thing I wanted to say real quick. Mrs. Hopewell describes her walking around making noise in a way that Mrs. Hopewell is convinced is being dramatic. Like she thinks she's lumbering around on purpose, making it louder than she has to make it, which I took at face value as being true. But as I read the second time, there's no

55:01real indication that might just be Mrs. Hopewell being actually a bit uncharitable. Like it might actually be impossible for her to walk around without. That's right. It could be. I don't think we know about that, but you get the sense probably some of the time it does sound like joy, Helga, to do that. But it also, I think Mrs. Hopewell could also interpret that anyway. There's something you said that I hadn't thought about. And I was saying that Mrs. Hopewell prides herself on her patience and you said she's sort of deluded herself. You know, the other way that it's

55:33obvious that she's deluding herself was when she's talking about how the Freemans are good country people because she's had plenty of experience with trash. And so she's hired four different people in the last four years and they were trash. So she had to get rid of them. Now that I think about it, there is no guarantee that she won't eventually come to the same conclusion about the Freemans. This is like she might've thought at the beginning of each of those things that they were good country people. Right. So this is a cycle. And then she actually loses her patience. Yeah. This might be a cycle that her and Helga go through like every year and maybe,

56:07you know, getting to the optimistic possible reading, this is the thing that could stop the cycle and have them progress a little bit. And I love the way Flannery O'Connor kind of dishes out details. Like you don't know, you know, a quarter into the story that joy is a philosophy PhD. It just kind of comes out, you know, and there's some very funny things about that. So this is all from Mrs. Hopewell's perspective. This is right after she's talking about how slovenly she dresses. She was brilliant, but she didn't have a grain of sense. It seemed to Mrs. Hopewell that every year

56:42she grew less like other people and more like herself, bloated, rude, and squint-eyed. And she said such strange things to her own mother. She had said without warning, without excuse, standing up in the middle of a meal with her face purple and her mouth half full, woman, do you ever look inside? Do you ever look inside and see what you are not? God, she had cried, sinking down again and staring at her plate. Malbranche was right. We are not our own light. We are not our own light. And Mrs. Hopewell had no idea to this day what brought that on. It's just so funny.

57:16It's so funny. And, you know, it made me look up what Malbranche thought. And there is like a little bit of irony here because Malbranche was like deeply theistic. He thought that like God pervaded everything. And, you know, talking about Spinoza's rock, like that's kind of what he thought about every action was just God acting. It wasn't really you moving your leg. It's God moving through you, which is just opposed to like the metaphysics of joy explicitly. Right. You get the sense she's, and I'm not a Malbranche scholar, but I knew that he was theistic

57:46and a big believer, at least on paper. And I believe that he might've said, we are not our own light, but probably if I had to guess saying it's because God is our light, you know? That's exactly right. Yeah. And I think he was, he was quoting or paraphrasing Augustine, Augustine, who said that, but in that context, like you're, you're right. There is also like a really great ambiguity, um, in that first thing that she cries out, do you ever look inside and see what you are not? God, which is, I think read properly on the surface as just like an exasperated thing

58:20to say at the end of the sentence. Like, do you know what you are not? God, but like you are not God is also there. That's how actually I read it. Yeah. But it's like very ambiguous. So Mrs. Hopewell doesn't think that a PhD in philosophy is an S tier major or, uh, the girl had taken a PhD in philosophy and this left Mrs. Hopewell at a complete loss. You could say my daughter is a nurse or my daughter is a school teacher, or even my daughter is a chemical engineer. You could not say my daughter is a philosopher. That was something that had ended

58:53with the Greeks and Romans. It's so funny that like you would boil down like the most significant choice of like your daughter's career to your ability to talk to other people in a sentence and describe. I think it's quite common though, that people think that. I'm sure. It also makes me think that although she is 32, so much of the way Joy Holger is described is like of a 20 year old. Like she talks, acts, and kind of exists as someone who hasn't quite grown up to the age

59:27that she actually is. So it's, it's like a girl that's come back from college telling their parents why Marx was right about the labor theory of value or something like that. It's like she is in this kind of arrested development of college, but she's moved on 12 years since then. Yeah, no, totally. I was wondering how much of this was an explicit statement on the ability of graduate school to stunt emotional growth because I feel like you can extend your adolescence or your

1:00:00early 20-hood very easily by going to grad school. She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity, Mrs. Hopewell. One day, you know, this is all just part of the comedy, but she just picks up a book that the girl had just put down. I like that even that, like in her perspective of the narrative, she's still a girl, that the girl had put down. And opening it at random, she read, science, on the other hand, has to assert its soberness and seriousness afresh and declare

1:00:31that it is concerned solely with what is. Nothing. How can it be for science anything but a horror and phantasm? Nothing. If science is right, then one thing stands firm. Science wishes to know nothing of nothing. Such is, after all, the strict scientific approach to nothing. We know it by wishing to know nothing of nothing. It says that these words worked on Mrs. Hopewell like an evil cantation in gibberish. I love that. And this is Heidegger, but apparently if she's seeing this as

1:01:02kind of a perfect description of the nihilistic condition that we all live in, I think, again, it is a misreading of Heidegger according to what I read, but I don't know. But it would be interesting if she's just misreading all of these figures that she takes herself to be the only person who can understand. Yeah, I think that's right. Also, this notion of nothing, like, will come back. Yeah. It seems like a central to her. Do you have an interpretation of this passage just

1:01:33as a passage since it seems so thematically central? Yeah, I read it as just the interesting metaphysical point that what nothing is is outside of the bounds of the discipline of science that can only be concerned with what is. Like, the question of nothing is terrifying and certainly not something science is equipped to or would like to deal with. Yeah, I mean, I guess it's that line, how can it be for science anything but a horror and a phantasm? It might seem like methodologically it's difficult to

1:02:04deal with nothing because science is about the physical universe. But, like, why does it have to be a horror and a phantasm for science? It is metaphysically hard to imagine. You know, if you ever, like, did you ever, as a kid, ask yourself the question, why is there something rather than nothing? Like, that's like a terrifying question to me. It's hard to conceive of the absence of everything. It can induce true terror in me to think too long about why is there something rather than nothing. Yeah, that's a big question. Yeah. And it is, in a non-cognitive way, an evil incantation

1:02:42and gibberish. Yeah. You know the Jewish joke about that, where someone goes up to this famous rabbi and says, Rabbi, why is there, I don't understand, why is there something rather than nothing? And the rabbi says, if there was nothing, you'd probably still be complaining. That's good. I had not heard that.

1:03:00What's interesting, just structurally, is we now are having this fully from Mrs. Hopewell's perspective, talking about Joy. And this is where we're first introduced to Joy, Holga, and the details about her life and the hunting accident. It was blown clean off and she was never unconscious. So, like, that she had to deal with the pain, I think, is scarring to Mrs. Hopewell and another reason why she's so sort of, like, protective or babying. And understandably, right? Like, that's horrifying. Absolutely. That's horrifying. It's also the thing that fascinates

1:03:31Mrs. Freeman. Dude, I just thought, too, that blown clear off is nothing. That wooden leg is a band-aid on nothingness. That's right. So, there's, where first she had a leg, she has nothing. Now, there's nothing. And- What is that? Also trying to read some of the secondary literature, like, the idea of the wood replacing her is, like, she has a wooden soul, you know? Like, there is something deeply not human. It could also be, like, the futility of trying to replace nothing with something artificial.

1:04:07Structurally, this is kind of interesting because we're getting this all from Mrs. Hopewell's perspective. And the triggering event we learn is that Joy had been talking to this tall, gaunt, hatless youth who had called yesterday to sell them a Bible. So, we hear about this kid who comes over. He's got a big briefcase full of, he goes farm-to-farm selling Bibles. He just seems like kind of a hapless young kid trying to sell Bibles. And Mrs. Hopewell tries to kind of get rid of them.

1:04:40Yeah. As one would a Bible salesman. Yeah, exactly. So, Mrs. Hopewell is not overly religious or religious at all. When he says, which is probably just a Bible salesman line, you don't have a Bible in your parlor. And he actually says, I see that is the one lack you got. That's like the lack, the nothingness that he wants to fill with the Bible. But then it's kind of interesting where she says she keeps it by her bedside, which she lies. It's in the attic. She has no idea really where it is. And he says,

1:05:10the word of God ought to be in the parlor. Again, like probably a salesman line. And she says, I think that's a matter of taste. And one of the things when I read that and kind of comparing it to a bunch of other lines is there is a bit of relativism that pervades Mrs. Hopewell as well. And a lot of her cliches are about that. It's a matter of taste. It takes all kinds, different kinds of people. So it's like, obviously, she would never frame it in those terms. And she has certain things where it's

1:05:42like good country people or trash. But a lot of things are just, it's a matter of taste. You know, it really depends on the person. Yeah, you're totally right. And like, I feel like my subconscious picked up on that attitude, but I hadn't thought explicitly. But that's totally right. It's a tolerance that borders into relativism. And then he does like, I'm just a caveman thing. But instead of saying, I'm just a caveman, he says, I'm just a country boy. And I like, I understand you don't want to fool with country

1:06:12people like me, which is the perfect thing to say to Mrs. Hopewell. It's exactly manipulative. And you wonder in retrospect, like, is he just very good at manipulating? I think that's he picked up on that. She has this like savior syndrome to the good country people. Totally. Like, I think you've got to think that just based on what happens, but you don't think of it at the time, you think he just kind of lucked out. And it was like, no, good country people are the salt of the earth. And here's another one. We all have different ways of doing. It takes all kinds to make the world go round. That's life. Just, just creches.

1:06:44Stringing together three of them. Yeah. Yeah. Four of them. So then we find out that he's manly pointer. Yeah. It could be a dick joke. And he says he's from out of the country and around Willow Hobie. Not even from a place, just from near a place. Yeah. Which is, so, I mean, we could throw this out right now. Is this a satanic figure? Oh, interesting. This reminds me of our discussion of a good man is hard to find because I think that he might be, but my interpretation at the end is that he offers some hope of salvation

1:07:20to joy by his actions, which was kind of what we were looking at last time when it's like, yeah, he's bad, but like through him. Yeah. It might be the only way to achieve some kind of grace is through this satanic-like figure. He definitely feels like a chaotic God, like a trickster, but like more malicious maybe than a trickster, like a bad trickster. Yeah. And a, but a very, like, he can exploit weaknesses of people and he can size people up right away. Yeah. Joy says, look, get rid of salt of the earth and let's eat. But no,

1:07:55she's hooked now, Mrs. Hopewell. And so invites him to dinner and they have dinner. You know, here's where there is just like some obvious symbolism where he describes himself as the seventh child of 12. And then he says that he sold 77 Bibles. These are just like, you know, the holy number of God is seven. 12 tribes of Israel. 12 tribes of Israel. Like these are, these are definitely numbers with meaning that he's thrown out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then you see, and I don't exactly know how Joy got to the road,

1:08:28but we learned that she walked him to the gate when he leaves and that they talked. And one of the things she's thinking about right now is what on earth could those two have had to say to each other? And we don't learn that until later. And then Mrs. Freeman, like as this little thing just kind of pops in and says, Glynees was out with Harvey Hill and, but Harvey Hill cured her stye. So he's a chiropractor that's dating her daughter. And the way he cured her stye is by like adjusting

1:09:00her neck. So we learned that they had, they, they scheduled this date, Joy. And, uh, why can't I ever remember his first name? What's his Marley pointy? Manly. Manly. Right. That's a manly pointy. Pointy. Fuck. Manly pointer. Cause you, you, you got Merlot pointer in your head. That's exactly what it is. I got that in my head. Think about it as like a dick stick, manly pointer. Manly pointer. Um, what I find that's interesting about this as we shift back to

1:09:30Holga's perspective is that you can clearly see that she's kind of excited about the date, even though she's not thinking of it that way. Like she stays up half the night. She was rubbing one out. She was totally. Yeah. She's thinking she might've seduced him. She's thinking like true genius can get an idea across even to an inferior mind. Yeah. She thinks she's toying with an inferior person. She's like, this is this innocent Bible salesman. Who's, whose worldview is so misguided. And she essentially by saying like, she's wants

1:10:02to seduce him and have him come face to face with his like transgression, like that he acted against his own beliefs. She wants to use that to like throw cold water on his face, wake him up from his dogmatic slumber. She wants to shake him up. Yes. She wants to corrupt him, but in service of revealing to him the truth about life to, you know, take the scales down from his eyes. And it's so funny. I mean, it's such a kind of reversal of that, what ends up happening, but, and it's almost a withering kind of, I don't know, critique

1:10:36of this character. The fact that she's thinking about him like this, but then also even, you can also see that that's part of it. But part of it is she's excited because she's never had a date in her whole life. She's never kissed a boy, you know, and, and the little sad, but she put some vapex, she puts the vapex on her collar. That's so kind of sad, but I think that shows that, oh no, this isn't about like educating a young man about the truth, about the reality. Yeah. She's getting something out of it and maybe even trying to convince herself that she

1:11:10doesn't actually care. For sure. Because when they kiss a little later on, even though it had like this surge of adrenaline, she says, even before he released her, her mind clear and detached and ironic anyway, was regarding him from a great distance with amusement, but with pity. She had never been kissed before and she was pleased to discover that it was an unexceptional experience and all a matter of the mind's control. So she really thinks she's got the power in this dynamic. And even

1:11:40though she's never like, that's such a huge thing for her to be kissed. She's like, oh, this is no big deal anyway. Just like, I'm so glad I was right about that. You know? Yeah. It's like, it's all just a unwillingness to be vulnerable or like a fear. Yeah. And oppose, oppose to herself. Like, because it's not even opposed to anybody else at this point. And her defense mechanisms like clearly intellectualizing. But the other thing that I just thought of is that this is, like you said, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. Both Joy Holger and her mom use other people as

1:12:14projects. Like they view other people as their personal projects. That's right. And they think that they can save them. And that, and speaking of salvation, as they're walking along, he asks her, you ain't saved. And she says to him, in my economy, she said, I'm saved and you are damned. But I told you I didn't believe in God. And then he's still just admiring her, which is exactly how she thought this would go. And I, and I liked, he says, ain't there somewheres we can sit down sometime?

1:12:44I'm just a caveman. And she says in that barn. So it's like, he makes it so that she suggests that they go to the barn. Totally. Yeah. Cause you know, she's enacting her plan to seduce him. And it's like a classic con man move is to make them think they're the ones who chose the thing that you wanted. Like that he brought them there to buy the barn. Totally. And there is some foreshadowing slash insight that the narration provides that presumably Holger notices, but doesn't really put it together where it says, nothing seemed to destroy the boy's look of admiration.

1:13:18He gazed at her now as if the fantastic animal at the zoo had put its paw through the bars and given him a loving poke. Yeah. That's her perspective. That's her perspective. But like what she doesn't realize is yeah, she is the animal in that he's in control over. He's the zookeeper. Exactly. Yeah. The more we talk about it, the more I think this is also about the illusion of control from both the characters, Hopewell and the daughter, you know, they think they're in charge and in fact, they are not at all. So they go up to the barn.

1:13:53He has his, we didn't mention, he has his big old Bible case and she's like, why did you bring that to our date? Never know when you might need the word of God. Exactly. So they're, so they kiss for a while and she's kind of resisting, but not really doing it. And then it's the interesting little exchange where he says, you ain't said you loved me none. You got to say that. And she doesn't want to say it obviously, but it seems very important to him to get her to say that. And the way she says it is such a kind of almost parody of a pseudo intellectual. She says,

1:14:29in a sense, if you use the word loosely, you might say that, but it's not the word I use. I don't have illusions. I'm one of the people who see through to nothing. And he's just like, you got to say it, you got to say it.